Caringo adds file system access to CAS clusters

Posted on December 11, 2008

-- On the heels of rolling out a new content router that moves data around its content-addressable storage (CAS) clusters, Caringo is about to round out its product line with software that eliminates the capacity limitations of traditional NAS systems.

Caringo is set to release the CAStor Content File Server (CFS), which provides standard file system access to its CAStor platform. The CFS is a $5,000 addition to CAStor that serves up a massive, flat address space that allows storage of millions to billions of files.

CAStor CFS is a POSIX-compliant file system that supports CIFS, NFS, Mac, FTP and WebDAV protocols, as well as the ability to run as a native Linux file system.

CFS also gives administrators the ability to apply metadata attributes to set retention periods for compliance, content distribution, and replication for disaster recovery.

Caringo's vice president of marketing, Derek Gascon, claims that CAStor and CFS have a leg up on file systems and NAS devices.

"Traditional file systems and NAS systems store files in blocks with multiple blocks per file. That means each block must be managed and it leads to capacity limitations, file number constraints and expensive systems," says Gascon. "They are layering on virtualization, but not addressing the file system underneath to solve the root cause of the problem."

The CAStor CFS, however, stores a file contiguously as a single, complete object. This approach, says Gascon, simplifies management and eliminates scaling limitations because the system only needs to manage a single address per file.

The system scales by clustering additional CFS servers for performance across common namespace and storage.

"This combines a massively parallel, scalable cluster of commodity hardware and an unlimited, clustered virtual file system," says Gascon. "It also rounds out our portfolio by enabling a single storage tier that allows companies to store and access live files and archive them in place without requiring another tier of storage."